Premium Plus - UcLinux apps, ethernet use?

[Matty72]

Has anyone written software to run under ucLinux and perhaps made use of the ethernet for MBee to PC connection or internet connection (weather, time...whatever)? 

Here's an idea, make MBee software available via ucLinux client app, i.e. 
a) allow direct download to SD-card, 
b) allow transfer to shared ram and a soft restart to launch it? 

Repository login credentials could be used to avoiding public access (assuming secure connection possible from ucLinux?)

Should we be making better use of the 68k/ucLinux especially considering a new Bee will soon be released also having 68k and ucLinux?

[ChickenMan]

Yes , I've asked the same questions way back, but never had any luck. There was someone a few years back interested in uclinux but nothing ever came from it.

[Matty72]

Shame.

TBH, I'd love to sink my teeth in but just have no time, I was really hoping someone else had played and created some handy apps or utils.

I'm working toward making more time for myself but not there yet. When it happens, i'm gonna be annoying.

A good tutorial on ucLinux app development would be nice at some point. I do wonder how much development can be done on the Bee itself, can one compile under ucLinux? The Bee networked at least would be of great benefit, i wonder what utils exist on the Bees ucLinux to aid PC to Bee network transfers.

AI can help us now with all of this - i kinda enjoy the ideas it gives me and examples it provides.

[MbeeTech]

Hey Matty.

In hindsight, well after the release of the Premium Plus, I wished I had not released uClinux for it.
It was a difficult implementation for a number of reasons, most particularly the keyboard and the shared memory access portion of the uCLinux available address space being very slow.
While the Coldfire processor ran quite well with it's internal ram (64k) the external bus interface only had 2 chip selects and both were for 8 bit accesses. One of the chip selects could run
at the speed limit of the ram (55ns) while the other was shared between the FPGA interface to the screen and I/O area of the Z80 buss and the other 1Mb ram. This meant that the timing
for that chip select had to cater for the slowest devices attached to it - 300ns cycles for the Video section. There were some work-arounds that I implemented, but generally I consider it as
'It runs, and that's impressive, but I shouldn't have gone down that path'.

There is no plan at this stage to release uClinux on the new machines, even though they have a 66Mhz 68k processor. There is also no ethernet on the new machines.
Looking at other OS alternatives for the 68K side of things for the new machines.

[Matty72]

Appreciate the detail Ewan. I'm sure toy around with it anyhow at some point.

It'll be interesting to read on what OS you settle on (and I hope there will be an 68k OS). Considering arduino style interface (from memory), are you favouring a RTOS?

[MbeeTech]

Hey Matty.
The first OS I'll provide is CP/M68k as that will be relatively quick to port.
Other options I'm considering are maybe EmuTos, and possibly GammaOS (from microbee's 1986 project Gamma) but we'll see what time resources I have to implement them.